Answer here.

From Daily Dot.

The Internet is an “essential” utility, like heat or electricity, according to a German court.

A federal judge in the southwest state of Karlsruhe ruled Thursday in favor of a man who couldn’t use his DSL connection for two months in late 2008 and early 2009. He’d already been compensated for a disruption to his cell phone service.

Under German law, companies must provide compensation for failing to provide customers with “essential material items,” according to Reuters.

Just re-stating the obvious, really. But it’s strange to reflect on how perceptions of the Net made the transition from something weird and exotic (in the 1980s) to a public utility like running water and mains electricity (now). The downside is that we take it for granted and are therefore incurious about what’s special about it — which in turn might allow vested interests (governments and corporations) to capture it. That’s one of the thoughts that led me to write From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet.

I’ve been reading Stephan Collini’s absorbing review of The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 3: 1926–1927 in the London Review of Books. A good deal of the review is taken up with discussion of the role that the Criterion, the serious highbrow literary quarterly of which Eliot had become the editor in 1922, played in the poet’s life. The magazine had at its core a small clique of literary intellectuals who met regularly for dinner. The thing about them that stood out for me is the fact that, with one exception (Bonamy Dobrée), none was an academic. F.S. Flint, for example, worked in the civil service. Howard Reed was a curator at the V&A. Alec Randall was a diplomat. And Orlo Williams was clerk to the House of Commons. (And of course for quite a few years Eliot himself had worked in a bank by day and functioned as a poet and literary intellectual only the evenings and at weekends.)

Noticing this led to one obvious thought about our own time. How many literary intellectuals – or even public intellectuals generally – nowadays have non–academic jobs? (Excluding journalism.) At the moment, I can only think of two: Matt Ridley, who I think is a banker of sorts (at least he was Chairman of one of the banks — Northern Rock — that spectacularly failed during the banking catastrophe); and Howard Davies. There must be others, but at the moment they are the only two that come to mind.

En passant, it’s worth remembering that the fact that the role of public intellectual has become the almost-exclusive preserve of tenured academics in the US is Richard Posner’s main explanation for the decline of the public intellectual in that country.

A friend of mine sent me a draft of a lecture she will be giving soon. It contained a reference to a book that she thought interesting and important. It was The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt. Since I take my friend seriously, I followed the link and bought the Kindle edition. And now I can’t get any work done: it’s one of those books that takes you by the throat and just won’t let go until it reaches the end. It’s a beautifully-written account of the rediscovery, in 1417, of On The Nature of Things, a poem by Lucretius, and of the impact that rediscovery had in shaping the modern world. The book won a Pulitzer prize, and now I understand why.